...every quarter the company reports its remaining subscription service suckers, a delightful yet depressing nugget of intel. AOL took home $143 million of operating income from that division--more than the rest of the company combined did--meaning those unfortunates pay out, on average, $20.86 per month for a service that's at best redundant and at worst utterly useless. That's up over a dollar from a few years ago.

There's some good news, though; the rate of decline in subscribers appears to be strong, down about a third since the beginning of 2011.

As someone in the Gizmodo comments pointed out, there are still some places in the US where dial-up service is the only option. Those places are what most people refer to as "shitholes". We get it, you're stockpiling weapons and trying to start a militia. Luckily for you, the Anarchist Cookbook is a quick download, even on dial-up.

Thanks to BBQ, who misses the hissing and screeching of a dial-up modem connecting.

Truth: I was in L.A. last week visiting family. I upgraded my grandmother from DSL to U-Verse, and quickly discovered she had been paying for AOL dial-up ($19.99/month) since 1999. She had DSL installed in 2004, so basically she's been paying them for nothing for over 10 years. It was a ridiculously convoluted process to cancel her account, as well.

seth_mckinney

"As someone in the Gizmodo comments pointed out, there are still some places in the US where dial-up service is the only option. Those places are what most people refer to as "shitholes". We get it, you're stockpiling weapons and trying to start a militia."

I've had broadband access for several years now, but I've been to many areas where it's unavailable, and most of those areas are where cattle ranches, farms (both produce and livestock), oil fields and fracking operations, mines (coal, gypsum, soda bicarbonate, etc) are located, or to put it simply, they're the places where the people who are the foundations of modern western society live.

Get off your high horse and go properly fuck yourselves.

Meredith Carroll

Geekologie might want to step outside their ivory towered city. There are a lot (I mean a LOT) of people in this country without access to anything reliable other than dial up. I know because my company works at bringing broadband into remote, rural areas. You know what happens when you don't have broadband in remote, rural areas? You don't have jobs. Which means you don't have money to move out of remote, rural areas. You might want to stop and think of what it's like being *trapped* in a shithole before disparaging people who have no escape from such places because the ROI isn't high enough to run cables out to places with low population density.

disqus_k2QxOV9H7Z

I wonder how is that. People from shitpoor places where the most technological object in miles is an old rusty bicycle manage to move out of there in the search for a better life. Those are places where most of the population lives below the poverty line, less than two dollars per day.

Kevin

You just described the ghetto. Except you can get broadband there.

JeeebeZ

I mean the real question isn't how many people are paying for it. The question is how many of those people still use it. I work for a ISP and we do still have people in remote areas and farms for people that use dial up.

Andyman7714

Wow, just had a nasty flashback to the 90s only to be cut off by a phone call.

just1nw

I read this article as meaning "2.3 million old people forgot about auto-pay in the 90s". I wonder how many of those folks are dead and AOL is just slowly siphoning away their abandoned bank acounts...

iofo61

Yep, thought the same thing. Back in the day, you had to lease your telephone from the phone company. Several years after telephones were being sold directly to consumers we realized that grandma was still paying the phone company every month for her leased telephone.